SINGULARITY

Singularity is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial superintelligence will create incredibly advanced technological growth, possibly resulting in humans being superseded by their own invention on the evolutionary food chain.

Futurists like Author Vernor Vinge and Inventor Ray Kurzweil have argued that the world is rapidly approaching this tipping point, where the accelerating pace of smarter and smarter machines will soon outrun all human capabilities.

They believe that once these machines exist, they will possess a superhuman intelligence that is so incomprehensible to us that we cannot even rationally guess how our life experiences would be altered. Vinge asks us to ponder the role of humans in a world where machines are much smarter than us, in the same way that we are smarter than our pet dogs and cats. How will our sentient masters treat us? What will we have taught them about our relationship with living creatures of lesser intelligence?

Kurzweil, a bit more optimistically, envisions a future in which developments in medical nanotechnology will allow us to download a copy of our individual brains into these superhuman machines, leave our bodies behind, and, in a sense, live forever.

The convergence of human and tech is fast becoming a reality, but what that reality looks like is still unclear.